I once had a lot of excitement about it, but the closer I looked at and used "web3" tech the more I came to the conclusion this is all a big pump and dump scheme.
What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.
Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.
Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.
You are incredibly confused like many on this site. Confused about the difference between marketing and actual technology. You've basically stepped into a metaphorical convention center with no aid for beginners, been hit with 99 sale's pitches that are genuinely empty and made the conclusion that the whole industry is a scam without realizing that your inability to discern the 1% of actual value makes you conflate aggressive false advertising with the entire space's promise.
I've written and deployed smart contracts, have run an ethereum node, and know most of the EVM opcodes. I'm not an expert by any means but my criticism of crypto isn't that of an "incredibly confused" beginner listening to marketing hype at a convention center.
Well perhaps you should expand your horizons a bit. If you have a good grasp of the core issues with Ethereum then you should have a good idea of what to look for in newer projects.
Let me ask this then - say a newer crypto project succeeds and works as advertised. What then? What specific future applications make you excited about it, besides trading crypto for crypto?
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
DAO's for one. The implications are broad enough that you could easily feign ignorance or straw-man what they mean. Unless you think the innovation behind Bitcoin is useless, then its hard not to be excited about how that innovation generalizes which is exactly the vision if not quite the result of smart contracts.
What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.
Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.
Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.